In the food industry, products are often transported in bulk by truck, for example from a factory to a warehouse or a retail location. For shipping, the product is typically packaged in small containers, such as boxes or cartons, that are suited for relatively easy moving by hand, and a number of the smaller containers are typically loaded onto a pallet for easy movement with a fork lift or similar equipment. These pallets are then typically loaded into an enclosed cargo container, such as the bed of a box truck or the trailer of a semi, from a door at the back end of the cargo container.
Sometimes, a cargo blanket must be spread over the top of the pallets or containers after they have been loaded into the cargo container. The cargo blanket may take any of numerous forms, such as an insulated cargo blanket or a tarpaulin or other similar flexible sheet of material. In one example, pallets of yogurt are covered with an insulated cargo blanket after being loaded into the cargo container of a container truck or a semi-trailer for temperature control during transport. Typically, the insulated cargo blanket is spread over the loaded cargo by hand, for example by placing a cargo blanket in a pre-folded condition on top of the cargo at the front end of the cargo container opposite the rear doors with a rope attached to it, and then pulling the rope by hand toward the rear of the cargo container through the rear doors to pull and spread the cargo blanket across the top of the loaded product containers.
A problem with this system, however, is that the cargo blanket frequently gets caught in cracks between the product containers and/or the pallets of product containers as the cargo blanket is pulled across the tops thereof. When this happens, typically the loaded cargo toward the rear doors is unloaded so that the cargo blanket can be accessed and released. Alternatively, someone may physically climb into the cargo container and crawl or walk across the product to free the caught cargo blanket so that it can again be pulled toward the rear doors across the remaining cargo. These problems can lead to inefficient loading and/or physical injury to the person pulling the rope to spread the cargo blanket, unloading and re-loading the product containers or pallets, or climbing across the cargo to free a caught cargo blanket.
Of course, this problem is not limited to the food industry or to trucking. Rather, the problems related to spreading a cargo blanket over loaded cargo in a cargo container may occur for any of a large number of different products, in different industries, and for different types of cargo containers.
It would be desirable to reduce, minimize, or even eliminate the problems described above with spreading a cargo blanket across loaded cargo in a cargo container.